WHEN I turn the corner into the exhibition room, I try not to stare at the paintings of the naked men. It feels too obvious; not the paintings themselves but me, the gay man, stopping to examine the portrait of a model whose erection climbs his stomach to brush his belly button, or the one who balances on his elbows and knees with his ass turned in offering towards the viewer. Their posture is familiar. I have seen these poses in pornography, on Instagram, in my mirror, on my bed. My body is not one that would be found in a magazine, but these men taught me how to put it on display.
Monica Majoli, an artist and educator, created her installation for Made in L.A. 2020, a crosstown exhibition showing the work of thirty Los Angeles-based artists in two different locations. Majoli’s paintings are pulled from “Blueboys,” a series in which she paints the centerfold models of Blueboy, one of the earliest national gay magazines. The magazine’s inaugural cover parodies Thomas Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy, which is on display in a gallery at the Huntington a few hundred yards from Majoli’s work. How many transmutations are present in the distance between the two buildings and the years in which the art was made? A boy becomes a painting that becomes a man in a photograph, and back again into a painting.
Majoli’s portraits are of centerfold models who were photographed between 1976 and 1979. Her artist statement reveals that “these images showcase a tragedy that had yet to unfold, as they were photographed on the cusp of the AIDS epidemic.” I wasn’t alive to see the men when they were first photographed. I was twelve years old when the magazine went out of print in 2007. Rather than magazines, I had the internet, which made it easy to see images of naked men but removed them from any real-world context. Blueboy’s models appear among news articles, interviews with artists, and personal essays. The images act as marketing lures, softcore porn by today’s standards, but they are also art of a kind and intrinsically linked to a sense of community and political awareness fostered by the rest of the magazine’s content.
Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy hangs at the far end of a 2,900 square foot hall. Dark wood flooring pulls my gaze forward and up to the blue sheen of the boy’s suit. His pale face is arresting, made haughty by its surroundings. In the parody cover, the boy is depicted as a man who looks demure as he pulls blue silk aside to reveal his bare legs. A black hat with a white plume covers his genitals. The boy is dressed head to toe in shimmering fabric and poses with one foot thrust forward and a hand on his hip. Translating the portrait through gay sexuality highlights its innate campiness and claims the gravitas of high art for a publication focused on queer bodies and concerns.
Majoli’s work mirrors this move, shifting that which could be viewed as solely pornographic back into art. She makes no effort to obscure her paintings’ origins, and displays issues of Blueboy in her exhibition. Her work is concerned with lineage and what was lost or obscured by repressive politics and the AIDS epidemic. When I hesitate to look closely at her paintings, I am also concerned about lineage and association. As a teenager, I shut off the lights in my room and typed “men in underwear” into a Google search bar. My hands shook, which made it difficult to scroll, and answered a question I never expected to be asking. I could clear my browsing history, but I couldn’t change the outcome, or the sense that I had done something wrong. This feeling has never entirely left me.
What would change if Majoli’s exhibition had been the source answering my question? What if it had been Blueboy? The internet gave me easy access to images and information that generations of gay men before me lacked, or that required a certain level of risk to obtain. It also gave me the sense that, because I recognized my sexuality by looking at pornographic images, my sexuality was inherently private and perverse. I didn’t understand myself to be one of many scared teenagers with a face thrown into relief by the blue light of our screens.
I also didn’t understand that there was nothing wrong with my search, and so, in the gallery, I ask myself to look again. Majoli’s art and the art she references understand the power of a gay man’s body as an object of desire, as a beacon. I know that the men are beautiful, and I know that I desire them. I also know that acknowledging this desire allows me to situate myself alongside them. To want them is to want myself is to want the legacy that this want affords us. To want them is also to acknowledge loss, which the men in the magazine probably understood better than I.
Majoli describes the production of her art as “a transfer process wherein the image itself is partially lost, or ghosted, while printed.” I am trying to think of my viewing of the images as the reverse of this process. In seeing them, perhaps something in me comes better into focus.
Nick Snider is a writer who lives in Columbus, Ohio.
